


HARD TIME

by orphan_account



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, M/M, Major Character Disappearance, Murder Quest, Revenge, Sharing a Body
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-18
Packaged: 2018-09-24 08:23:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9713195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: She smiles.He cowers.





	1. (shore)

Julia Burnsides arrives in the Astral Plane on the heels of fire and ash.  
  
Kravitz takes no notice.  
  
It wasn't personal. It's just that people happened to die a lot. He was aware of the incident at Raven's Roost, but never learned the intimate details.  
  
Very early in his days as a reaper, one of the things his employer had impressed upon him was the necessity of maintaining balance. 'If you think about them only in numbers, you are too far away. But if you think about them only in stories, you are too close,' she said.  
  
Kravitz leans towards the former, thinking about death in abstract ways. On jobs, Kravitz often references his Souls' Ledger—the tome containing columns upon columns of names and numbers of souls departed, souls escaped, souls returned—even when he knows it by heart.

So it takes a while for her to catch his attention. In-between reapings, audiences with the Raven Queen and his rounds at the Eternal Stockade, Kravitz has little time to visit the soul mud. Where millions of souls drift, losing their sense of self and returning to being-in-the-world.  
  
In the tides, he sees small, violent swirls and ripples. Kravitz does not know her name then. He simply sends a passing prayer her way, asking for stillness to come to the soul.

Their first interaction happens sometime later.

From the Western parapet of the Eternal Stockade, he sees a black speck on the shores of the soul mud.  
  
She's desperately clawing her way out. Her long, dark twists of hair are lapped at by the waves. The souls are resistant, unwilling to let her go, sucking her back in. Her amber soul-light is stretching itself to its very limits, attempting to take on a corporeal form.  
  
Kravitz appears before her a statue, anger carved in his bones of ivory and depths of obsidian, ruby eyes twinkling in the dusk. She looks up at him, revealing a face that unlike the rest of her form is opaque. The soul's face is broad and open with skin the colour of s harvest moon.  
  
'By doing that, you will destroy your soul,' Kravitz warns, his voice accented, formal. 'The Raven Queen takes no pity on souls who struggle against what is natural—neither do I.' He tacks the last part on as an afterthought.

He waits, expecting her to flee back into the depths. There was a reason he choose this form after all. Yet amber soul-light does not move, 'You're going to have to do better than that.' Her voice is thick and wet, 'I am kind of over being soul goo.'

A slow, measured breath rattles through his teeth. There were too many stupid, arrogant mortals who think they stood above the natural order of things!

'Look—' Kravitz gestures at her, too angry to speak, 'you—'

'Julia,' she offers.

'My apologies, I don't care,' He is a good ten seconds away from throwing her in the Eternal Stockade. 'Listen—when you become goo—you stay goo. Those are the rules.'

'Oh, _my_ _apologies,_ I don't care.' She shoots back.

Kravitz loses his patience. He reaches down, plunging his hand into her soul, gripping onto something only those touched by Death can hold, and throws her back into the waves.

***

The next few times they meet Kravitz finds her lying on the shores like a beached whale.

He is careful not to extend the conversation beyond a warning and a well-practiced throw. Yet he soon finds himself stuck between a rock and a hard place.

When he tells the Raven Queen about her, hoping for guidance, she considers the matter for only a moment. Use your discretion, she tells him. Frustrated, he retorts that his 'discretion' was what landed him in this precarious position in the first place. And, as soon as he says this, any semblance of warmth he still possesses is siphoned away from him, leaving an empty, glacial void in its wake.

'If you wish to leave her soul to expire on the shores of the soul mud, then you do that,' she mumbles, statuesque on her throne. 'If you wish to throw her in the Eternal Stockade, then do that. The decision is yours to make. The consequence is yours to bear.' Kravitz only moves when she dismisses him with a sharp jerk of her chin.   
  
So he is at a a loss. Experienced as he is, Kravitz has no frame of reference for how to deal with her. He knows the procedures for souls who have escaped from the astral plane, for mortals who ignore the natural rules of life and death. The problem for him is that there is no flagrant violation of the rules, just a minor skirting around them. Adding to his confusion, Julia does not seem to attempt escape. Rather, she just waits—for someone—  
  
—for him?

***

  
The next time they meet on the shore, he sees her soul is beginning to fray. The amber is beginning to decompose, pieces darkening, breaking off in chunks and washing away with the waves.

'Okay. Stop. You have to stop,' he says. 'Whatever your endgame is, you aren't going to accomplish by doing _this._ ' He looks at her tenuous form.

'—you—you aren't sending me back to goo town?'  
  
'… goo town?' Kravitz can't believe he's indulged this soul for longer than ten seconds.

She, however, seizes the opportunity, 'Whatever, _soul mud_ or whatever your kind calls it—doesn't matter.' Each word comes out a forced choke, 'Listen, I have things I need to do before I'm good to be dead... for good.' Kravitz opens his mouth to object, '—and don't you dare mention _rules_! What? You think I'm losing chunks of myself for fun?'

Another piece breaks off, as if to underscore her point.  
  
'Well, Julia—it's Julia, right?' He doesn't wait for her response. 'I'm afraid you don't have a lot of options here. Frankly speaking, I'm finished with the whole beached whale routine. Go back in the soul mud and get reincarnated like everyone else or cease to exist—pick one.' 

She coughs out horrible, warm, wet laugh, 'Bullshit—what's the third option?'

He flickers to the existence that is darker than the spaces between stars. In swift motion, he summons his scythe and swings it down mere inches from where she rests.  
  
Julia merely smiles.

Despite their positions, Kravitz feels like trapped prey.


	2. (intention)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> let's call it what it is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for the nice comments and kudos! you are the wind in my depressed sails.

Julia Burnsides cuts through false choices much like the battlewagon racers of Goldcliff. In ways that are very illegal and sometimes—and Death is loathe to admit this—very effective.  
  
Kravitz lets out a shakey sigh, finding that his anger is replaced with a rapid, unrelenting anxiety that claws at his throat. He is at the point of no return.  
  
He summons a small, non-descript urn and places it gingerly in front of her prone form.  
  
'Get in.'

'I'm not getting in an urn.' She says flatly.

'You should get in the urn.' He tries to steady his voice. 'Look, I don't do this— _ever_. I'm doing something that I shouldn't be—yet here I am. So _this—_ ' He jams his thumb at the vase '—this is option three!' Kravitz is offering something to her and there are many, many reasons why that is bad idea.

'Ok.'

'What?' He didn't expect that.

'I just—I guess I just—I don't know what I expected but—thanks.' Her form glows brightly, returning to her soul-light and drifting into the urn. Kravitz exhales, releasing a breath he didn't know he was holding.

***

He finds out Julia Burnsides is the head of Raven's Roost Beekeepers' Guild. She descends from a long line of Matriarchs. Women who played and worked in the sun. Skin the colour of the buckwheat honey they harvested.  
  
'Waxmen is my Mum's name—Dad took it on. His side did wood and metalwork and Mum's side did bees,' she explains. 'He was so, so nervous about marrying her. I mean our Guild was getting antsy about the outside business coming into town. You know, the Craftsmen's Corridor and all that? Honestly, it was so silly, they just couldn't see the opportunity—so, Mum gently told the Guild to extract the sticks they had lodged up their asses and establish trade relations. So—long story short—they got married and Dad took on her last name as a show of good faith.'

Kravitz has taken them to the material plane and they hide in the dark recesses of the forest. These actions leave Kravitz imagining himself possessed, as if he is watching a stranger make decisions in his place. The only thing that keeps him grounded is the heat emanating from the urn.

'So you are in fact descended from a long line of beekeeper royalty?' He says, bemused.  
  
'I am, in fact, the dead-as-fuck Bee Ruler of these lands.' He notices that when she laughs, the pot pulses warmth in tandem. Grounded.

'The problem was the power vacuum that came to exist. Like, the Craftsmen's Corridor and the Beekeepers' Guild weren't necessarily interested in power and expansion, so much as protecting what was their own. I mean, let's just say, we aren't _Goldcliff_.' Kravitz imagines the roll of her eyes.  
  
'—but Callen—when he came in—what you have to understand is that he just about swept us all off our feet. It was Raven Roost's own whirlwind romance.' The shame in Julia's voice leaves a sour, bitter taste in his mouth. 'I had just been made the head of the Guild and when I met him... he said all the things I wanted to hear. Improved roads, better infrastructure, and a—a militia that understood what the fuck safety and security meant. No more harassing women—no more unexplained arrests.' The urn is scalding. Kravitz grips it tighter, in sympathy or desperation he does not know.  
  
'I trusted him! My fucking mistake. Promises of progress and emancipation coming from the lips of an outsider, ahem, a _progressive_ no less—well, fuck me—hook, line and sinker. Oh, and I nearly forgot the best, best fucking part! Because, did you know, he made sure everyone knew that he had my backing. Made that very fucking evident to all of Raven's Roost. Definitely became a very convenient scapegoat for a while there. Because “ _Missus Julia_ , if you cannot discern who is deceitful and who is not, how are we the simple craftsmen and beekeepers of Raven's Roost supposed to?'”

His head is buzzing.  
  
'—and you sort of know the rest: he went too far, we revolted and he ran off. I met my husband around then—rebellion makes . But Callen came back a few months later and—yeah.' Her voice finishes a whisper.  
  
Kravitz collapses against the trunk of a large cedar tree. He is too present right now. He knows he has heard countless tales like this before, but here is a reason Kravitz only chooses a few of them to hold onto. _Balance,_ echoes the Raven Queen.

The half moon casts a muted light through the feathery boughs of the tree.

He asks the next question without thinking.

'What do you want to do then?' What a stupid question.  
  
It takes her moment. 

'I—I want to cuddle with my husband and watch the slow advance of that motley crew of wooden ducks. Mags is fixated on those and, ha, well—I'm fixated on him.' Kravitz suddenly feels like he's intruding.  
  
'—I wanted my Dad to stop pretending that his back wasn't fucked up. He would have retired—a-and we could have gone on a few sailing trips down South like he'd wanted. I wanted to run the Guild the way it was meant to be.... wanted to tell my younger cousin it's okay that she wants to kiss a girl. I really wanted to lick fresh lavender honey off my fingers—figure out what the hype was.... maybe try making some for Mags...' Her voice grows distant.

Then comes back with a precision focus, 'I want to destroy the man who did this to me. To _us_.'

'I can't do that.'  
  
'I didn't ask you to,' she snaps. 'I can murder on my own thanks.'  
  
This was exhausting, 'Well, that's delightful news! For a moment, I was concerned I might've needed to hold the scythe for you while you disintegrated into nothing!' He snaps back.  
  
' _Excuse me_? Shove that attitude back from whence it fucking came. You _asked_ me what I wanted to do. I answered.'

Guilt washes over him. 'My apologies. That was inappropriate.'  
  
She doesn't say anything, expecting him to continue.  
  
'It's just—it's not that simple.' Kravitz suspects Julia would punch him if she had a body. 'My abilities, you see—they are supposed to function only as tools of retrieval and arbitration. So I—I can't interfere in that way. I mean—technically—I _can_ but there are... checks and balances and—'  
  
'Stop,' Julia silences him. 'I'm not going to apologise for wanting this or even asking for it—I'm being selfish because I have to be. I know Callen is not the worst thing to have walked this world. But he's my worst thing. And I want him to die—it's that simple—so.... please.'

 

 

***

In the afterlife, Julia comes to understand, there is no such thing as a happy compromise.

'I'm going to keep your soul intact,' Death tells her. He's calmed down and he sounds as if he's reached a decision he's comfortable with. This is good, Julia thinks. She knows she has upset his routine, his protocol, his way of doing things and it is good, she thinks, that he can adapt. It will make him better at his job.  
  
Julia stares up at him. In her soul-light, everything comes through warped, fractals of amber. Still, she can see his earnest red eyes, his ebony skin and high cheek bones. Indeed, when not a part-time skeletal nightmare, Death is a young, very handsome, very dead elf. Julia thinks he could give Mags a good run for his money.

'First, please forgive the, uh, delay—as you might've guessed, this is new territory for me.' Death almost sounds embarrassed, he had had to step away for a moment. He continues, 'Second: I will help you. I promise.' When he says this, Julia finds she believes him, 'Third—and hear me out before you decide to cut my fragile ego to pieces once more—I do not know how or when you are going return to the material plane to perform this... task. So what I'm offering is this: I will keep your soul from reincarnating. In the meantime, we're going to wait for an opportunity—a backdoor, if you will.'

Julia knows he's not telling her something, but something in the back of her mind keeps her from pressing it. So she tries another tactic instead, 'Why waiting? What about all the other people he could hurt?'  
  
'Oh, Julia, do _not_ try that on me.' He says testily, 'You were perfectly clear about your motivations. Do not lower the good people of Faerun to fodder for your revenge quest.' Death sees right through her. 'I'm doing not this because I find your goal more noble or deserving than others but—'  
  
'You want to see how your decision plays out?' And she sees right through him.  
  
'I—Yes.' He admits.

***

So they wait.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm pretty excited for the next few chapters! that's where we will be hitting up feelings town. as always, comments and kudos are appreciated and loved!

**Author's Note:**

> naughty souls who do not leave kudos or comments will be sent to goo town.


End file.
